Sunday, April 19, 2009

language and emotion (you do not articulate words with the throat and vocal cords alone)

In Eeh Tristan Kermulyan's piece On Hominome Languages, Kermulyan offers the following thesis: "the fundamental formants and phonemes of hominome languages generally induce the same emotional contrails in all members of a particular species regardless of geographic distribution." Kermulyan defends this thesis by remarking: "the articulation of speech -- formants and phonemes and all -- results from the same physical processes regardless of the person, and therefore, the same tissues will be excited by similar vocal vibrations. It is pointless to regard a language as a random, historical arrangement of sounds without factoring in the emotional and physical basis of speech: words and phonemes which, through the patterns of their phonemes, excite similar vibrations in oral tissues, will have similar emotional valences, and this should be independent of the origin of the language, therefore we should expect to see patterns of phonemes with similar meanings from evolutionary distinct language lineages." Vhe also goes on to say "the m-sound in Om, Mom, amo" all have similar emotional valences. "erythro, rhodo, red, vermella". Kermulyan then goes on to say that what makes a language unique is the way it remixes these fundamental emotional timbre-hues into words and says that there is a lot of variation in which ways a language can remix them. He says: "if a child of one culture is raised from near birth in another, and knows only the language of the other, then all of its internal emotional-aural-hues will arise from the other -- this is to say that there the so called linguistic supremacy arguments that are offered by arrogant cultural partisans are manifestly false." he further goes on to say that he expects languages with similar emotional-timbre-hue sets to be harder to learn than ones with more distant remixes.

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